〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

A shorter in/out this month, as I spent a lot of it handling some family medical stuff and being generally very, very tired.

mysterious book still mysterious (but less so)

Remember a few months ago when I told you all about the mysterious, alluring book I found while poking around in the British Library archive website? I heard back from the curator about it!

"These Batak manuscripts made of bark with wooden end boards are well known as divination manuals (pustaha)," wrote Dr. Alexandra Green. "Made of bark paper folded concertina-style between two wooden boards, datu  (ritual practitioners) wrote pustaha as reference works that recorded spells and incantations, ranging from love formulas to methods for removing enemies, oracles, ritual procedures, divination formulae, and recipes for potions. Only rarely did they include records of historical accounts or myths. They were handed down between datu, each of whom added to the contents and to the listed genealogies."

Dr. Green pointed me to other examples of these books, and a few of them include images of the interiors. Apparently "concertina-style" is kind of accordion like — where the pages are bound to one another and the front and back pages are bound to the front and back covers respectively. Sometimes, the covers have incredible and large carvings on them. Look at this one! Look at it!!

An old blog post on the British Library website says "Probably because of their intriguing appearance, Batak manuscripts are encountered in more libraries and museums in Britain than manuscripts in any other Indonesian language."

One of the pustahas they have at the British Library, "contains the text of the lemon oracle (poda ni panampuhi), with instructions on how to tell from the way two sliced ends of a lemon drop into abowl of water whether or not a prospective sweetheart is suitable, or to fortell the results of war."

In 2022, the British Library partnered with Universität Hamburg to digitize their collection of Batak manuscripts. This was tricky for a couple of reasons, and this blog post about that is absolutely fascinating. Because these manuscripts are written in lines parallel to the folds of the book, and the text is read left to right. The illustrations in the books are often set at a 90 degree angle from the text. Which means that reading these involves rotating the book, something that the Digitised Manuscripts portal that the British Library had at the time couldn't do! Because they had never needed to! And here's a bit of extremely in-the-weeds wrangling they had to do with file names:

However, in digitising Batak manuscripts at the British Library, we were severely constrained by the strict filenaming conventions associated with the Digitised Manuscripts portal. This portal had been originally developed about ten years ago for a Greek manuscripts project, and was therefore predicated upon the norm of manuscripts in codex form, with folios or leaves each consisting of two pages, the first (recto) and second (verso). While the portal had successfully been adapted for Malay manuscripts in Arabic script, reading from right to left, Batak pustaha in concertina form brought their own challenges, for we were not able to assign filenames of the form ‘A 1’ or ‘B 2’ for Batak manuscripts. As our priority was to ensure that the images were presented on the portal in the correct order, replicating the actual manuscript, we devised a system whereby all the pages of side A were assigned ‘recto’ image numbers, while side B images were numbered in the same consecutive sequence, but as ‘verso’ images. Thus a pustaha with 34 leaves would have images on side A numbered f001r to f034r to represent pages A 1 to A 34, while after turning the manuscript over onto side B, pages B 1 to 34 would be numbered f035v to f068v. This unconventional ‘manipulation’ of the existing filenaming system has allowed us to present the images in the correct order, but it means the filenames of each image are not easily correlated with the contents lists in catalogue information.

I wasn't actually able to find any of the Batak manuscripts in the Digitised Manuscripts portal — if you can find them on this list let me know (the shelfmarks listed here don't seem to match the ones I found on this old blog post and I couldn't find an updated list).

But now we know more about this mysterious book! I still want to touch it.

tokyo → taipei

At the end of the month I was on Tokyo and then Taipei, and I don't have anything pithy or clever to say about either place (not because they aren't wonderful, but because my brain is mush) so here are a bunch of photos for you to enjoy.

Above, a shrine that we wandered around in the rain to find:

In 1821, aristocrat Sessai Matsuyma ordered the erection of the monument. Its purpose was to console the spirits of the flies, crickets, and grasshoppers that had been killed in the production of a scientific text — an anatomical study of insects that Matsuyama himself had commissioned. Although the book, the Chuchi-jo, would become famous for its realistic rendering of the insects, it seems Matsuyama was plagued by guilt at having caused the deaths of so many fellow living creatures. Or perhaps he simply wanted to honor the bugs for their contribution.

One thing we did that I definitely recommend, if you're in Tokyo, is the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, where they've carefully relocated a bunch of historically interesting buildings and you can walk through them all and see how people really lived. It's a bit of a schlep from Tokyo proper, but I thought it was totally worth the train ride.

The local Tokyo baseball team has created bespoke fragrances for each and every one of their players, and included a little graph for how to know which ones smell like what. This is the best merch I've ever seen.

While we were in Taipei, we happened to be there for the Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Which was very cool! Some pieces I liked (not all of which were technically part of the Biennial, for the record, and we didn't wind up getting to see the whole exhibit because not everybody in my family wants to spend hours looking at modern art):

But my favorite thing we saw at this museum was a piece that requires video to really appreciate. It's a piece by Hung-Chih Peng called "The Flying Wall." You can't really understand this piece without a video of it. I had assumed I'd be able to find a good one online but I can't so here's my crappy video:

I find this very effective!

reading

• As part of my new Horror Curriculum, I read The Need by Helen Phillips. It was good! At first I didn't love the time jumping — the book begins with a really terrifying thing, which is inter-spliced with flashes back to things that have happened earlier. This had the sometimes-frustrating effect of interrupting incredibly suspenseful moments to go do something mundane and I found it irritating at first because I wanted to know what happened with the [redacted spoiler]. But having finished the book, I actually get why she did it that way. It makes sense for what the book is about, and what it's toying with. And she doesn't draw it out so long that I wanted to truly skip ahead. My next horror book is Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, which I saw recommended in Kelsey McKinney's newsletter and jumped on an available copy at my library. After that, I've got North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud.
• "But looming over Grindfest in recent years is the specter of something decidedly un-punk: VC funding." 〰️ Loved this piece by Britt H. Young about how body hacking (a subculture I used to cover quite a lot) has changed over time.
• "In short, today’s homeless encampments settle in the scars of Oakland’s twentieth-century environmental apartheid." 〰️ Ben Jameson-Ellsmore on understanding landscapes and people.
• "It can be good to shock our families. It can help us remember who we are." 〰️ This review made me want to both read the book it's about (Cassandra), and also read everything else Elizabeth Freeman has ever written.
• "One of my colleagues, when she hears the “but everything is on the internet” line, responds that it’s on the internet because she put it there. I didn’t put it there, myself, but I do have some understanding of how it gets there and what it takes to get it back out." 〰️ Anne Helen Peterson interviews a hospital librarian about what her job actually is.
• “The wombat is a joy, a triumph, a delight, a madness.” 〰️ How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed With the Wombat
• "“I had my first kiss here.” “My father died with a missile here.” “From here they [the military] dragged me like a dog.”" 〰️ Ayham Dalal on how top map a city that has gone through violent, drastic uphaeval.
• "Among the centuries’ worth of eggshells, prey remains, and natural nesting material, researchers identified 226 objects that were either made or altered by humans. These included weaponry like a crossbow bolt and wooden lance, decorated sheep leather, and parts of a slingshot." 〰️ Multi-Generational Vulture Nests Hold 700 Years of Human Artifacts

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

my writing

At COYOTE, I published a couple of things you might be interested in!

• A piece on how we realized that a bunch of pitches we were getting were written by people using AI.
• A story about an iconic Bay Area jazz club and the struggle to save their historic facade.
• A piece about why you should leave your house and go to a roller derby bout (and what you need to know at one).

I also published our first bit of fiction at COYOTE! A short story, that is a little creepy and a little funny. I hope you enjoy it.

I think COYOTE has been doing some great work generally, by the way. If you haven't yet checked us out, please do. We've got anime, a guide to who's providing free/discounted meals for SNAP recipients, essays about monster trucks, debates about queer food, photos from a secret liquor store rave, and more!

And for paying subscribers to this here website, I wrote about how to listen. Later this month, subscribers are going to get an excerpt from a novella I'm working on, along with a conundrum I have about how to talk about said novella.

short stories

While I was traveling, I wrote out ideas for a bunch of new short stories that I'd like to work on in the next few months. Properly short ones! Under 13k words which seems to be my annoying sweet spot for stories and there are very few markets who take stuff of that length.

Speaking of, my story "Soft Power"was rejected again. I'm losing hope, even though so many of the rejections have been very kind and persona, and my agent likes the piece. Perhaps I will simply publish it here for you all?

two steps forward, one step back

Two months ago I told you about my non-fiction book spiraling, and wrote "I tried to figure out a way to home in the argument of the book itself. I think I've done that, at least half way. I've got something that I think makes sense to me, in terms of a structure and a frame."

Well it turns out I was wrong. I spent the last month trying to work on the proposal with this new framing, and then realized that I had actually made the scope of the book wider, rather than narrower, and in fact that was the opposite of what I needed to do. Sigh. I am trying to tell myself that this is progress in some way. That all this tortured thinking is useful and will make the final product better — more focused, sharper, clearer. But if I'm honest it feels a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic a lot of the time.

revision revision revision

November's plan is to prepare myself for a big revision of Project CUBENSIS — my novel. My agent gave me a wonderful list of notes that are very helpful and I think correct, and/but addressing them means really getting into the draft and adding/cutting/rearranging things. I need to make certain things higher stakes, and other things can fall away. I need to make one of the two main character's choices seem harder, and make a betrayal feel bigger. I need to clarify the speculative element of the book so it lands more clearly, rather than hinting at a wisp of a thing.

I bought some books on revision recently, because I'm a sucker for craft books even if I hate them. My recent haul includes:

• Craft of Scene Writing : Beat by Beat to a Better Script
• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, Second Edition : How to Edit Yourself Into Print
• 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love
• Revision and Self Editing for Publication : Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Novel That Sells

Most of these came recommended by friends, so I'm excited to see what they have to offer.

That's all for this "short" version of the monthly in/out. Right now I'm a 9, worn out as hell trying to keep my eyes open. Next month's will likely be short too since I'm spending a good chunk of the month abroad. Onward and upward. Fuck ICE. Take care of one another.